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Wednesday, January 09, 2019

With $16 billion in 1,700 ongoing technical cooperation projects, and more than 19,000 staff working in 130 countries, GIZ is one of the world’s biggest technical cooperation implementing agencies. This article reviews the GIZ role in German international development assistance and, GIZ policies on Results-Based Management, Monitoring and Evaluation.

Who This is For: Project Managers, Bid ManagersLevel of Difficulty: Moderate to complexMost useful: Guidelines on designing and using a results-based monitoring system (RBM system)

The size
and scope of German International Assistance

According to Donor Tracker in 2017 Germany was the second
largest donor for international development assistance in gross amounts
disbursed.

Even given the fact that the $
24.7 billion budget for international assistance included roughly $6 billion
for refugee related expenditures, this still makes Germany in gross terms the
biggest donor in Europe, and the second biggest in the world. It ranked 6th in Europe in terms of % of GNI contributed.

Germany is
also the largest contributor to the European Development Fund, the largest
component of EU-administered development assistance.

The two
largest components of this development assistance are managed by KfW Development Bank and its subsidiary DEG, the German Investment Corporation and BMZ – the Ministry of Economic
Cooperation and Development.

The Role and Function of BMZ

While much of this German ODA was managed by KfW Development Bank, and other government Ministries, BMZ - The Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, administered the largest portion of the budget -roughly 37% of the ODA budget in 2017, and that was predicted to rise to 49% ( $10.7 billion) in 2018.

Of the 8.5 billion Euro ($US 9.5 billion administered by BMZ, in 2017 several billion was provided for
financial cooperation, some through the European Union’s aid mechanisms, some to the World
Bank, and the regional development banks, to foundations and civil society organizations. Some was
also provided to a wide range of United Nations agencies.

GIZ, as an implementing agency itself received roughly 2.6 billion Euros (close to $3 billion) in 2017, roughly 2.5 billion coming from BMZ and other German ministries, the rest from organizations such as the European Union, U.N. agencies, foundations or private sector companies, for the implementation of technical cooperation activities and between 2015-2017 was the largest recipient of Europeaid contracts, and although no longer the single largest recipient in January 2019 remained in the top 3.

The Role of GIZ as an Implementing Agency

There was a time when the aid agencies of the world – USAID, CIDA, DFID, AusAid and others actually implemented their own aid programmes, but for the past 30 years, turning policy into practice has been farmed out to private or public organizations, U.N. agencies, consulting companies or foundations specifically, contracted to manage projects.

GIZ is sometimes mistakenly thought of as a donor agency, but while it has input to German aid policy it is basically the chosen instrument of the government of Germany to implement technical cooperation. GIZ was formed in 2011, with the merger of the public development agencies GTZ, DED and InWEnt, a capacity building agency. The German Development Minister at the time, Dirk Niebel said GIZ would be “...a lean, economically efficient, transparent implementing agency” The BMZ website puts GIZ’s role this way:

The Deutsche Gesellchaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) is responsible for technical cooperation with Germany’s partner countries, for preparing and sending out development workers, and for human resources development and further training.

GIZ is not a charity organisation. All GIZ projects are based on a specific commission – from the German Government, from our main commissioning party the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), from other federal ministries or from other national and international clients

Size and Scope of GIZ activities

A good case could be made that GIZ is in terms of its internationally based staff, the largest technical cooperation agency in the world, and the second largest in terms of the number and value of the projects it is managing.

GIZ itself had an income of 2.6 billion Euros, or close to $3 billion for technical assistance projects in 2017, as noted above.

But this pales in comparison to the total value of GIZ currently active projects in 2019 – 14.4 billion Euros or approximately $16 .5 billion in over 1,700 projects in 130 countries.

95% of the value of projects it manages come from the German government – either from BMZ or

other agencies.

UNDP in 2017 had a bigger annual budget - $4.6 billion – for 4,500 projects in 170 countries, but there is no easily available information on the total value of its ongoing projects.

GIZ Staff levels and location compared to other agencies

GIZ has office in 130 countries outside of Germany, and as of 31 December 2017, GIZ had a total of 19,506 staff, 57% of whom were women.. Of these, 3,753 were working in Germany and 2,305 were employees seconded abroad. In addition, 13,448 staff were working as national personnel in the partner countries. Eighty per cent of GIZ's total workforce were working abroad.

In comparison to GIZ:

BMZ the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, which provides 90% of the GIZ budget, itself had only 1000 employees, with 120 posted overseas in 43 offices.

USAID, had a total staff of slightly more than 10,000 in 2016, including American nationals and host country employees, 3,000 working in the U.S., with approximately 2,000 USAID staff or others working abroad, and roughly 5,000 local staff overseas in 50 countries. [USAID staffing report to Congress, June 2016, p. 4, 79.]

Project Data

First - to select a region, to see the total number of projects, and the concentration by sector

Second - to select a country (or countries)

Third to sort by sector,

Fourth to get details on the project topic, start date, the amount of money, the project officer responsible, with the contact email address.

GIZ project detail - selecting a region, and a country (click to enlarge

GIZ project detail - selecting a sector and a project

Results Based Management, Monitoring and Evaluation at GIZ

There are a number of documents produced by GIZ over the past 7 years, outlining slightly varying approaches to describing results. In some the sequence appears to be a standard version of the OECD/DAC results chain as described in a 2017 OECD synthesis of donor results based management, I reviewed in March 2018.

But in more complex GIZ projects, programmes or Fund arrangements, in different documents the results chain has several variations

Variations on the GIZ results chain

In some cases the Outcomes are disaggregated as Immediate and Intermediate Outcomes.

The most authoritative of the guides provided, one which appears to have set the basic framework for subsequent GIZ statements on results, is the 2014 Guidelines on Designing and Using a Results-Based Monitoring system (RBM system) (p. 7). It essentially abandons the linear concept of results, and puts them in what is probably a more realistic, although somewhat confusing context as a series of interrelated activities, short term and long term results.

"In results chains, a distinction is made between input indicators, activity indicators, output indicators, outcome indicators and impact indicators, in line with OECD/DAC terminology. In practice, however, donors do not have a standard definition or understanding of which dimensions in the change process are measured at which results level. Nor are results chains always systematically adjusted to OECD/DAC terminology” p. 18

In practice, in large and complex projects with multiple components such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a multi-donor project to which GIZ is a contributor, the results map in the abstract, as visualized by the GIZ M&E Guidelines for EITI Impact

could be so complex as to discourage participants.

GIZ Guide - Attempting to Map Results in Extractive Industries

An illustration of the possible complexity in applying the GIZ Results Model to projects is illustrated in one coastal zone biodiversity project, included in the notes by Eric J. Lacroix for a 2015 course on Project Management at Kulna University in Bangladesh. The results model looked like this (p. 35):

Example of the GiZ Results Model applied to a coastal zone biodiversity project

“Sometimes the complexity of this map of different outputs and outcomes and the different stakeholders responsible for them can lead to people giving up on monitoring and evaluation. They produce reports of aggregated activities and outputs instead because at that level of the results model it is easiest to generate attributable and quantitative data to describe the results of an EITI programme. This kind of reporting fails to address the question of whether all of that activity had a positive impact or not; no theories have been tested, no evidence has been proven or disproven” [p. 5]

The GiZ Results Model in Practice

But as Dawn Roberts noted in a 2013 World Bank Institute paper on managing knowledge results which reviewed an earlier
draft of the GIZ results model, “The results model is designed to be compatible with the results logic of other development agencies while also remaining flexible enough for use across all GIZ’s business areas and instruments.” [p. 16]

And, given the GIZ focus on results as changes, not just completed activities or Outputs, the flexibility on language and terminology means that in practice, in the field, the complex results model can be translated into something easier to work with, easier to use for developing indicators and for producing results reports. The abstract pathways to impacts diagram for the EITI M&E Guidelines above, for example, has produced a somewhat simpler generic draft results model, which is still under discussion.

I have found that working on indicator development for a GIZ project, the framework provides no barrier to focused discussions with stakeholders, so in practice it is adaptable..

GIZ also has a fairly comprehensive and complex Excel tool for entering the results, indicators and progress to help them aggregate results agency wide. But most of the burden for using this appears to go on the shoulders of GIZ staff, not field project managers, and there are, in any case some detailed guides on how to use the tool for projects in different sectors.

The bottom line:
GiZ keeps a low profile, but it is a large organization with extensive reach in technical cooperation throughout the world, and despite an initial appearance of complexity, its approach to Results-Based Management is flexible, and relatively easy to work with.

Greg Armstrong is a Results-Based Management specialist who focuses on the use of clear language in RBM training, and in the creation of usable planning, monitoring and reporting frameworks. For links to more Results-Based Management Handbooks and Guides, go to the RBM Training website.

About Me

Greg Armstrong brings what we know about how adults learn to helping international development workers use Results-Based Management in their work. If it is done right, it can be enjoyable, and productive, helping us explain our work to others.